Data Tools and Software Testing : Misc

Changing Gears

nihitk — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 04:46:00 GMT

After a memorable ~5 years on the Commerce Server team, I recently changed gears and have joined the world of SQL Data Programmability.

There are a ton of cool things happening on this front and the area my immediate team will be working on currently is the XML Editor and XSLT Debugger (yes - there is an XSLT Debugger and it completely rocks!) tools in Visual Studio.

Looking forward to blogging more on this new (to me!) world of XML and Data Programmability Tools.

The BEST Silverlight sample of them all...

nihitk — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 22:06:00 GMT

Oh well...I am biased since I worked on this...but I really think this is a COOL demo of silverlight and AJAX and what eCommerce scenarios can look like.

I especially like the use of videos which I was initially skeptical about but I think can actually influence the impulsive buyers a lot while creating a really immersive shopping experience for the other visitors as well. You will of course need to install Silverlight if it's not already installed on your machine.

Here is a page with video on it.

And on this page you can see a sunglass and zoom in easily and see various colors etc. of the sunglass via hovering. Try adding to shopping cart for a very snazzy UI experience as well.

All in all I think it is a great demo - Kudos to everyone who worked on it!

What's NXT?

nihitk — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 08:48:00 GMT

Finally managed to make at least the first basic robot using the Lego Mindstorm NXT kit which I ordered recently. Still haven't tried the Microsoft Robotics Studio (which recently announced the October 2006 CTP release) but that will be the next (or should I say 'nxt') thing I shall be doing. Among other things it contains the cool CCR (Concurrency Control Runtime) which can be used in any app, not just robotic apps and which Richter explains quite well in this MSDN article. Here is a snap of my very first robot:

A lot of other things have been happening as well, including my completing 5 years at Microsoft (a few months ago actually but never got around to taking a snap of it!) which got me the 5 year anniversary memento shown below:

Another recent change on the job front has been that I have taken on a new role as an SDET Lead and so will be getting more involved with managing and developing people as part of my day to day job. Have given it a lot of thought and am really excited to have gotten this opportunity in my curent team itself. Might even have a few insights of my own that I would like to share in some time.

IE7 Beta 2

nihitk — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 07:26:00 GMT

Delicious! I finally decided to jump in and give IE7 Beta 2 a shot and I am just loving it. Just got done uninstalling my loyal Avant Browser (sn iff!sniff!). In the past 2.5 years I have gone from CrazyBrowser and MyIE2 to MSN toolbar to Avant and can finally be satisfied with IE itself. Gotta give Kudos to the IE team for a great looking Beta2. Next time round I hope we (as in Microsoft) jump faster on the updates and don't wait for Mozilla to take X % share before reacting.

Another great tool that I have recently run into is Foxit Reader - a lightweight PDF file reader - no more waiting 5 minutes for Adobe Reader to load and display an IRS form. Got to it from the PCWorld top 100 freebies list - worth checking out.

Aadi Ashok Kaul

nihitk — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 01:43:00 GMT

Don't know if I've ever been this proud of anything so much - feel like screaming at the top of a mountain and letting the world know - I AM A DAD!

Wow! Feels great and feels like life will never be the same again (and am sure it won't as many have told me)!

Here are the official stats for my son Aadi Ashok Kaul:

Name:    Aadi Ashok Kaul

Date:      Feb 2, 2006

Time:      7:44 PM

Place:     Overlake Hospital Bellevue

Weight:   7 Lbs 8 Ounces

Height:    20.5 inches

You can read Aadi's Hello World message (including the meaning of "Aadi") and see some of his birth snaps here.

Welcome to the world Aadi!

What should an error dialog not look like?

nihitk — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 03:59:00 GMT

How about this:

But it sure made me laugh - wonder if that was the intent?

Blogger on Auction

nihitk — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 03:46:00 GMT

Going, going, gone! Sold for $3350!

Jeremy Wright from Ensight recently sold his blogging services for 3 months, on eBay.

Who says blogging is of no use?

Blogs for the Masses

nihitk — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 03:36:00 GMT

Just in case, you haven't heard the news - MSN has come out with the Beta of a new and fabulously cool general blogging tool called MSN Spaces. I tried and loved it for a lot of reasons, among them:

Photos - This makes it so much more personal and effective as a communication medium.
Drafts - This one feature has to be my favorite - the ability to write a post and save it simply as a draft which is not published. I have lost count of all the files where I have jotted out ideas on which to blog at a later time. Very, very useful (and something that is missing from even popular blogging engines such as .Text, on which the MSDN blogs are being run).
Look and Feel - Very customizable UI with themes and layout control.
Access Control - Allows you to make your blog viewable by only certain people. This is so important if people are expected to share their personal lives and stories with family - not everyone wants to share the fact that their dog is not well today with the Whole Wide World.

It has lots of other features as well such as sharing your book lists or music lists etc. - so give it a shot and see if you like it. But keep in mind that this is a BETA, so don't expect the world (I already got one of my accounts locked out and permanently unavailable).

A big Kudos to the MSN Spaces team (who seem to be really busy since the Beta was released). Some of the great blogs I found from the MSN Spaces team members are those of Mike, Dare and Scott.

Quote of the Day

nihitk — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 02:15:00 GMT

Loved this quote I got in my Quote of the Day RSS Feed by H. L. Mencken (no idea who he is though):

"It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."

Love it when people humorously and subtly put man in his proper place. Plus this quote highlights a fact which is easy to overlook and not well understood => that man has not really “descended“ from the ape. We are merely 2 branches on the evolutionary tree - a simple fact, but hard to swallow for some I guess.

Hinglish - Thanks to Baraha!

nihitk — Mon, 24 May 2004 05:58:00 GMT

Discovered a really cool software some time back to help me type in Hindi.

Problem was that I had lost touch with writing in the actual Hindi script (Devanagari) and plus there are all the issues related to typing a different language using the English keyboard. All of these were solved by using Baraha - the software allows you to type Hindi in English. To clarify, you write the word as best approximated by the English text and the software keep converting what you are writing to Hindi as you write. So for e.g when you write
something like "Namaste" you actually see the Hindi version of the word - in real time. Check it out if you need something like this (it converts to Kannada, Sanskrit and Marathi as well as of now).

A big Kudos to the Baraha team - I will make it a point to send in my donation that they request from users (you have to send in a check). They even have a version of Baraha for Windows 3.1/3.11 (the only software I have used recently to be supported on 3.1/3.11). Now that's what I call customer satisfaction...:)

RSS Bandit Rocks

nihitk — Sun, 09 May 2004 22:16:00 GMT

I knew about RSS Bandit but hadn't really tried it so far. Finally tired of SharpReader taking up tons of memory on my box, I decided to try RSS Bandit and am loving it. Especially the light memory consumption (compared to SharpReader). Next stop will probably be Newsgator (though currently I don't like the idea of launching Outlook for checking blogs - maybe it takes some getting used to) or FeedDemon (though none of those 2 are free, so it might not be fare to compare them to RSS Bandit and SharpReader).

Among other random things read this classic GirlHacker (aka Lilly Tao) post about Mother's Day - random, factual, interesting and maybe even useful. I like her style of blogging. This was right after I saw Nuts(which by the way I loved).

Off to a good start...

nihitk — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 09:29:00 GMT

Well, looks like India got off to a fabulous start by winning a nail-bitting one-day cricket match by 5 runs (I wish I had seen this game - probably ranks as one of the best one day cricket matches in the history of the game). This was the first match in a much hyped up tour of the Indian cricket team to Pakistan. Hope that the cricket brings peace between the two countries. For those wondering, what the hell is cricket, you can learn about the game here.

Nihilism and subtextual deconstructivism

nihitk — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 08:47:00 GMT

Hold on! Before you think I have lost it and write me off, check out this Postmodernism Generator (which creates a new essay for you every time you visit it). Completely fabulous stuff.

Hats off to Alan Sokal (author of Fashionable Nonsense) for pulling off an amazing feat which serves as an eye-opener on how gullible most of us are. In a nutshell what he did was, submit a completely farcical paper to a journal of cultural and political analysis and amazingly it got accepted and printed!

I am in the middle of reading this great new book of Richard Dawkins (one of my favorite writers), A Devil's Chaplain. Many thanks to him for writing about this fascinating hoax in his book. Kudos!

New Home

nihitk — Sat, 14 Feb 2004 10:59:00 GMT

After a bit of consideration about the kindof blog that I will enjoy writing, seems like msdn might not be the best fit for me (I don't think I have enough techincal nuggets to offer or share). So I am in the process of looking at alternatives. The most appealing to me currently is to have a personal web site which contains a blog as well.

I am thinking about .Text for now since it seems like it will not require anything to be installed on the server (at least for a one site configuration) and thus can be hosted by any ISP which will be ready to host ASP.Net web sites. But I would like to consider any alternatives if available. Any suggestions? (Am trying to read up about dasBlog to see if that will fit my bill as well).
My requirements are that the blog has to be hosted as part of my larger web site. Should be ASP.Net based. Should allow posting mechanisms, so that I can do dual postings using a tools such as Newsgator (on the rare occasions where I will have some technical content worthy of putting up at MSDN). Should not require me to install or do any custom setup on the web server or at the IIS level. And should not be a beast to wrap my head around.

Tabbed windows and more

nihitk — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 07:51:00 GMT

I never thought I would find a feature so useful, but I am addicted to it. I just cleaned up my system and I found I missed the tabbed windows of CrazyBrowzer the most. Now why doesn’t IE add that to its list of features? (Mental note – Add that as a suggestion to Scoble’s blog entry asking about IE feedback).

Though here is something quite cheap of CrazyBrowser – if you go to its home page in IE, it launches a pop-up window for PowerIE – some paid tool which seems like a superset of CB. I hate it when a company resorts to these gimmicks.

Apart from the tabbed windows, which I think are really useful (a colleague who is probably equally addicted, compared working in IE to working in Visual Studio without the tabbed windows. Probably a difference in the degree, but I think there are similarities) another great feature in CB is of coupling all related pages together as a group – no such feature in IE.
Also CB adds over IE features – for e.g. when you look at your IE favorites through CB, at the top of each category is a “Open All Links” option which makes so much sense since most of the times, if you have a category of favorites you would like to look all of them up together (News, Books, Shopping sites, Science etc.).